23rd March: Naomi Richman (Birkbeck, University of London) Deviance and Desire: Representations of sexuality and evil in the Nigerian Deliverance Churches. Respondent: TBC.
Fantastical and gruesome depictions of blood-sucking witches and penis-snatching mermaids are plentiful in the stories recycled by the Deliverance churches. But what do these stories reveal about underlying understandings of evil, sexuality and desire? And how does analysing them help us make better sense of gender dynamics as they unfold on the ground, both within these churches but also outside of them? Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Nigerian Deliverance churches, this paper analyses representations of central demonic characters in the Deliverance imagination to investigate what they tell us about the status of sexual desire and deviance. This paper argues that the fantasies and phobias of female sexual deviance that are so pervasive in Deliverance discourses serve as a basis for these church's efforts at strict social control of women and their sexuality.